Designing a successful ocean wave converter or power plant is complex, and for over a hundred years, a large number of different designs have been trialled but still none are in commercial production and none have proved beyond doubt via the public release of actual performance levels (which is the standard in the established wind turbine and solar industries) that the design can make commercial levels of power output let alone at an acceptable cost. The reality is there is a limited amount of energy in the oceans waves with average wave height of about 1 meter prevalent in most oceans of the world, and the energy is very difficult to extract being a pulsing type energy available about every ten seconds being an average wave period, and some 50+ meters between consecutive waves. This makes it extremely difficult to produce commercial levels of consistent electricity and for a design to be successful in this environment requires a very specific design that is tailored to the energy source.
The prior art shows many different ocean wave energy converter designs have used floats or buoy type designs to extract the energy from the waves, and these are either independently operated or non independently operated and are either round or cylindrical designs or those that are elongate or rectangular. The present invention relates to those ocean wave energy converters that use an array of elongate floats that are independently operated.
U.S. Pat. No. 1,925,742 discloses a single trailing arm which has a float thereto affixed and as such the design is very low in power production and has a very small buoyancy volume to move up a wave. U.S. Pat. No. 3,957,398 discloses lots of two telescopic arms, each lots of two arms being fixed to an elongate cylindrical float. The arms are operated independently of each other. The small buoyancy volume offered by the cylindrical floats and the large distance between the floats is inefficient at extracting energy from the waves and again results in low performance per square meter of the energy converter. U.S. Pat. No. 4,560,884 discloses two trailing arms pivotally attached to each elongate, independently operated float but the floats are too small and are spaced too far apart for the wave energy converter to make sufficient power for each square meter of energy converter, and thus again the design has a low power output and is not economical. It is suggested that the above prior art does not individually or in combination provide the right mix of features required to produce a high energy density or acceptable cost ocean wave power energy converter.